It has always been challenging to maintain computers in a large organization. Most organizations employ a technical support department for this purpose. A technical support department typically has a number of responsibilities, including ensuring that each computer is kept up to date both as to hardware and software, performing troubleshooting activities, and maintaining the network and servers interconnecting the computers.
To adequately perform these tasks, it is desirable to have information about how each computer is configured. This is not necessarily easy, since the various computers may be configured differently, and these various configurations may change rapidly. And, in many organizations, users frequently move around from computer to computer, thereby making it difficult to determine for each computer who the true owner, or main user, is. Thus, a large amount of time is spent, on a fragmented basis, trying to obtain specific configuration information about the computers. This gathering of information can be painful, and the gathered data can be in varying formats, thus making the data difficult to manipulate and interrelate. For instance, members of the technical support department often need to physically visit a user's computer and manually collect configuration information about the computer, which takes time away from both the user and the technical support staff. Manual collection becomes nearly impossible for large groups, such as those containing thousands of computers. Lack of an accurate up-to-date inventory is a serious issue in such a time-sensitive context.
Nonetheless, there does not appear to be at present any repository or centralized accurate up-to-date inventory of computers and their configurations. Nor does there appear to be any standard method for obtaining and updating computer configuration information.